Nana Akua: I'm sick to my back teeth of smug electric car drivers

This whole climate thing is really beginning to wind me up. Now don’t get me wrong, I am all for not chucking plastic into rivers and being mindful of other species living on the planet.. But when it comes to carbon emissions and climate change.

I’m sick to my back teeth of smug electric car drivers. During this whole fuel crisis some of my smug electric car owner friends called me to gloat. Let’s examine the carbon footprint of the electric car. The components such as lithium are scarce in resource, yet on average each car will require some 4000 lithium battery cells, presumably mined in a country where labour can be exploited like China. The cars themselves are considerably heavier than their fossil fuelled friends and are silent so you won’t hear them coming and if they hit you, even going slowly, good luck getting up.

Then there’s the infrastructure required to support them, so charging points for all, including those living in high rise flats and people without garages and driveways. Are we seriously going to dig up pavements and roads to accommodate this. If it’s even possible. The charging itself.. Apparently if we all plugged in our electric cars at the same time for example, overnight which would be reasonable, the national grid would buckle and blackouts would be common place. Energy is also used to manufacture the vehicle – and, in particular, the battery.

Which there is the small matter of it’s disposal. This push to own electric vehicles, driven (pardon the pun) by a middle class elite, is another vapid, ill thought out concept. It’s alright for them, with their driveways and garages where they can conveniently charge these contraptions overnight, but what happens if you haven't got that facility. What if it runs out of juice.. for example on smart motorways. Don't get me started on those.

It wouldn’t surprise me if this latest fuel hoax, which has allowed many garages to double their prices, was firstly to make up for the fact that no one was buying any fuel during the pandemic and secondly to push us further down the electric car route. Also in the pipeline are hydrogen powered cars and boilers, but I am sure we can cast our minds back to what happened to the Hindenburg.

If you’re too young to remember, then Google it. Basically, the climate impact of electric cars, depends on how the electricity you use is made. While no greenhouse gas emissions directly come from EVs, they run on electricity that is, in large, in most parts of the world, still produced from, you guessed it, fossil fuels.